Mount Polley Mine says Hazeltine Creek ‘alive and well’ after 2014 breach

70 million dollars!

That’s how much money Imperial Metals has spent on remediation since the breach at Mount Polley in August of 2014.

A public meeting on the topic was held at the Royal Canadian Legion in Quesnel last night.

“The bulk of the work has been really rebuilding the creek, and then essentially revegetating the sides of the creek so that we can return it to a productive ecosystem, essentially as much as possible reproduce what was there before, so it is as or more productive than it was,” said Lynn Anglin, Chief Scientific Officer.

“Right now the point we’re at is re-establishing fish habitat in the creek. Rainbow trout into upper Hazeltine.”

Anglin says the last step was to re-establish the fish habitat in the upper Hazeltine, which is roughly three kilometres.

She says they built a hatchery on site and released more than 11 thousand young rainbow trout into the creek in September.

Anglin says there is still more work to do on the lower Hazeltine to reconnect it to the lake.

She says that 70-million dollars also includes reconstructing Edney Creek which was the connection for salmon to Quesnel Lake…

“Edney Creek was the major creek, Hazeltine was a very small creek that often went dry at the end of summer and had a natural barrier for salmon coming upstream and often had beaver dams. But we wanted to make sure that when the salmon returned in the fall that they had a connection to that watershed and Edney was the major creek and that was actually our first priority for fish habitat reconstruction and we did that in the fall and winter of 2014, and that work was completed in early 2015, so that when fish returned that fall, they could come into that watershed, and they did.”

Imperial Metals is hosting a meeting tomorrow (Friday) night in Williams Lake at 6:30 at the legion and there will also be a meeting in Likely on Saturday. (Dec 15th)

– With files from George Henderson